There are a lot of things going on with the talent trees lately... I've been a Demonology Warlock since Vanilla... I've seen some cool changes but I'm curious as to what the community can come up with. To lead off I'll share a few ideas on what I feel should become Baseline and Passives that will make the choice meaningful.

Baseline:
Master Summoner - Really 6 seconds to cast a pet is long enough.
Pushback - Just bake it in.
Hit - Just bake it in.

Instead of just baking in pushback, lets revamp the mechanic in general. All casters seem to have (or had) the talent, so... fix it. Same deal with +Hit. Those that needed more should have a talent that has extra tacked on.

I could care less about the '___ reach' talents, so long as nobody else has them either. But if they do, then yes, they should be as described (or tacked on to a +damage talent).

I would personally change the +X% Shadow / Fire Damage to +X% DoT / DD Damage. Of course I would also drop Shadow Bolt from the affliction rotation, replacing it with a drain (life, soul, or something new).

If we did switch Demo from level 10 Felguard to level 10 Meta, we should make it so the other demons are very useful to Demo 'Locks. Make a connection to the demon with Meta, so they get a boost of some sort (thinking demonic empowerment here). The blueberry needs to keep up with my threat, ya know?

I'm not sure what I would do with Soul Leech in Destro. To me, it feels more like an affliction talent (life recovery has been their specialty).

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Some days it's just not worth chewing through the restraints.

At level 10, give us an easy quest to unlock battlegrounds (go talk to so-and-so in a capital city) and introduce the idea of a PVP build and the importance of PVP gear. Maybe you get your first piece here. There's probably some overlap in some talents, but it would fix the problem of talents which make sense for PVP but are meh or useless for PVE being available to people who only do PVE. It might also help ease the balancing act when it comes to talents which are nice in PVE but OP in PVP. Maybe we'd automatically be switched to our PVP spec when we zone into a BG or arena. World PVP and ganking would probably have to happen in PVE spec for everybody but balancing those fights is never realistic anyway.

With different talent trees, PVP abilities and PVE abilities could evolve in different ways. It would be possible to have different numbers of trees for each domain. Maybe 1 or 2 warlock PVP trees and 3 PVE trees.

This would also be a better use of dual specs. My friends who do arena want 6 specs (3 for PVP and 3 for PVE) but I think they'd be happy if we had 2 PVP and 2 PVE specs. Four or 6 wide-open specs seems pointless for most classes.

Many of us have made no secret that we are displeased by the lack of progress with the warlock talent trees. The current Cataclysm 31 point trees accomplish few of the goals Blizzard set with the updated system. So I've taken it upon myself over the last 2 days to create what I feel are much better preliminary 31 point trees. And if I can do this in 2 days I think we should expect Blizzard to have the trees much farther along than they currently are.

For each tree I have tried to balance talents around 6 different categories:
1) Mandatory for PvE, not very good for PvP
2) Mandatory for PvP, not very good for PvE
3) Mandatory for both PvE and PvP
4) Mandatory for PvE, optional for PvP
5) Mandatory for PvP, optional for PvE
6) Optional for both PvP and PvE

I also tried to put more of the mandatory talents toward the top of the tree so players aren't forced to choose 5+ points on any one lower tier, which would make it difficult or even impossible to take only 31 talents in that tree.

In the first 2 tiers I tried to find talents that were representative of that tree so lower level players could "feel" their spec sooner, while not giving too much power as a secondary tree choice.

One thing you may also notice is that there are no talents that take more than 3 points to fill. If Blizzard wants people to have more options then forcing them to put 5 if their points into a single talent doesn't make a lot of sense.

You will also see that all trees have 6 full tiers with 4 talents per tier. This means 25 different talents for every tree. And it really wasn't that hard coming up with 25 for each tree either. Given more time I could probably come up with 5 more per tree if needed.

Most of the talents I chose are already in the game, or in the current Cataclysm preview. For the new talents that I created, as well as any other spec changes details will be posted directly below each tree. Please also keep in mind that I made up these names rather quickly, so some may seem a bit silly.

So without further delay, here is what I came up with for affliction:

Many warlocks have expressed their distaste for having to still spam shadow bolts (a destruction spell) after specializing in affliction. To remedy this drain life will now be the affliction warlock's filler spell. The primary buffs to this will be Soul Siphon and Rapid Drains. Soul Siphon may need to be reworked to ensure that drain life is powerful enough.

Rapid Drains- The damage component of your drain life now ticks every .75/.5 seconds. The healing ticks are unaffected. (This basically doubles the damage done by drain life.)

Amplify Bane- Increases the effect of your next bane spell by 15%. Off GCD. 2 Minute CD. (This is similar to what amplify curse used to be.)

Exposure- Exposes the shadows in an area, revealing all stealthed enemies and placing a debuff on them that keeps them from stealthing again for 8 seconds. 20 yard radius, .5 second cast. 12 seconds CD.

Suicidal Thoughts- Your curse of agony spell has a 2/4% chance to make your target's next attack damage itself instead.

Improved Curses- Increases the length of your curses on other players by 30/60/100%

Improved Unstable Affliction- Gives your Unstable Affliction a 30/60/100% chance to bounce to another enemy target when it is dispelled. If no other enemies exist it will be refreshed on its current target.

Demonic Sacrifice- Sacrifices your demon, giving you a short buff depending on the demon.Succubus - Vanish for 8 secondsVoidwalker - instantly heals you to 100% healthImp - increases your damage by 15% for 20 secondsFelhunter - removes all magic effects on you and reduces your chance to be hit by spells by 90% for 8 seconds.Felguard - resets the cooldown of Metamorphosis

Converge- When your felguard intercepts a target your damage to that target is increased by 5/10/15% for 5 seconds

@Kalium:
Right. The current design does not have trees dedicated to PVP. I think it would be interesting if they did exist in the next design, at least for battlegrounds & arenas.

Some of the bloat, some of the noob traps, some of the bad specs, some of the trouble getting to the next tier are caused by using one set of talents for both PvP and PvE builds. Part of the difficulty in balancing classes for PvP and PvE stems from not having the ability to say that a particular talent works one way in PvP encounters and another way in PvE fights. If you separate the trees, your snares can have an explicitly shorter duration in the PVP tree and/or be fewer in number in the PVE tree. You can buff/nerf abilities in the context where it matters instead of impacting PVE play because a talent doesn't work as it should in PVP.

The decision to get a talent that extends casting range v.s. one that does more damage is interesting for PvP, but not so much for PvE. As the trees are designed today, every raider gets the chance to put points in useless talents. If Blizz wants to make it so that talent choices are about choosing how to buff your character rather than whether you can do online research, they could do worse than structure the talent trees so that PVP talents are not options for PVE builds.

They could also adjust the rate at which talents are gained in the PVE tree v.s. the PVP tree. For example, you could give people 1 PVE point every 2 levels but 5 PVP talent points every 10 levels (e.g., at level 30, you get 5 PVP points and 1 PVE point) so that everybody in the 30-39 bracket is working with the same set of PVP talents even if gear and stats still differ. I think this would make the importance of character level in BGs less significant. People in any bracket would be more alike in terms of what they can do; I think that would be a step forward.

@ydnandrew:

Quote:

Many warlocks have expressed their distaste for having to still spam shadow bolts (a destruction spell) after specializing in affliction.

Why not just move ISB into the affliction tree? Destruction is mostly a fire tree and doesn't use SB anyway so ISB doesn't exactly fit there. Affliction is all shadow damage so having a shadow bolt spell works for me. Nightfall still procs an instant SB, right?

Last edited by Beryo; July 16, 2010 at 01:54 PM..
Reason: ffs! I hate how the forum combines replies into one post when i'm replying to more than one person

@ydnandrew:
Why not just move ISB into the affliction tree? Destruction is mostly a fire tree and doesn't use SB anyway so ISB doesn't exactly fit there. Affliction is all shadow damage so having a shadow bolt spell works for me. Nightfall still procs an instant SB, right?

Simple, ISB is in the destro tree because it revolves around a destruction spell. It certainly does fit there, especially at lower tiers where demonology locks can grab it.

Nightfall, while it gives you instant shadow bolts, revolves around corruption ticks, making it an affliction talent.

Besides, the arguments I keep seeing from affliction locks it's not that they don't want to dip into destruction trees. It's that they don't want a destruction spell to be one of their top damage spells.

Since the thread is about what should be instead of what is, why should SB continue to be seen as a destruction spell? Would people feel better if the trainer called it an affliction spell? Better yet, have him train generic "warlock spells" that anybody can use without triggering an identity crisis.

I'm not sure how that makes sense. You don't afflict people with a shadow bolt. It's a direct damage spell. ISB does put a debuff, or affliction on them, but that's about as much as I could stretch it.

Perhaps we could turn shadow bolt into a kind of very short dot? We don't use it for pvp anyways (not really), so give it a longerish casting time (say 3 sec w/o haste) and make it do damage every second for 3 seconds (with the first tick on impact or end of cast). It could kind of be like a short single- target damaging regrowth (druid spell). That way, we could safely move it's talents over to the affliction tree, and we now have dots causing our damage instead of a nuke.